Amd zen would finally be manufactured by tsmc at 16nm finfet

Initially there was talk that the next AMD Zen microarchitecture would be manufactured by GlobalFoundries with the new 14nm FinFET process, however AMD could have stepped back to trust TSMC and its 16nm FinFET process to manufacture its next microarchitecture.

GlobalFoundries seems to be moving slower than expected with the 14nm FinFET and AMD would have decided to go for TSMC's 16nm FinFET to avoid availability problems of its future chips based on the new Zen microarchitecture. AMD is going through one of its worst moments in the CPU market and can't afford a new fiasco with Zen so you would have decided to bet on insurance with a TSMC that can offer you more guarantees than GlobalFoundries.

AMD Zen, SMT technology, DDR4 and 40% more IPC than Excavator

With Zen AMD abandons the SMT design introduced with Bulldozer and that consists of sharing elements with the aim of being able to introduce more cores and improve multithreading performance, at the cost of sacrificing performance per clock cycle (IPC).

Due to the little success of SMT, AMD has decided to abandon it and bet on a design of full cores with Zen together with SMT (Simultaneous multithreading) technology very similar to Intel's Hyper Threading, which should allow to greatly increase the IPC of Zen to while offering excellent multithreading performance. AMD already talks about 40% more performance per clock cycle (IPC) compared to Excavator.

Zen will also be the premiere of AMD with the new DDR4 RAM, although it seems that it will maintain DDR3 compatibility in a similar way to Intel Skylake, so the memory to use will depend on the manufacturer of the motherboard. Along with Zen will come the new socket AM4 that will allow the use of APUs and the successors of the current FX, with which we will finally have the socket unification in the AMD desktop processors.

Source: wccftech